The Kremlin has ditched its iPads over fears that they would not withstand US snooping and replaced them with Samsung fondleslabs.
Telecoms minister Nikolai Nikiforov said Sammy's gizmos were "specially protected devices that can be used to work with confidential information".
"Some of the information at government meetings is …

Exactly

Most Samsung devices can be rooted and flashed. Russia could build a fork of Android without all the Google stuff in there if they so wished, or security harden it, or disable certain functionality like camera / microphone.

The biggest danger is some 3rd party builds still use binary driver blobs which could potentially contain exploits or backdoors. Supposedly some Samsung devices have suffered precisely that problem recently. They'd really want to build as much as possible from scratch.

Re: It really is sad......

Re: It really is sad......

The worst of the worst is Facebook, it spies more than the NSA GCHQ CIA or any other agency does and reports back to Facebook all this information and they have the FBI stalking the corridors of the Facebook Campus. ;) Why do you think Zuckerberg is so interested in flying drones to 'connect the world to the internet'? at the same time it is taking pictures and pulling information, posts and messages and anything else.

Proprietary loose canon code is all accidental?

Re: Proprietary loose canon code is all accidental?

Could it possibly be because of all the malware available for Android?

Even if the Russian governments own coders build their own Androidski, given the large number of excellent Russian programmers working for botnet purveyors, who _doesn't_ expect Kremlin mobe traffic to appear on the (BitCoin?) market for sale to the highest bidder?

Putin' the Crime into Crimea

Compatible

I guess nobody endorses Putin's actions as of late over here in the Western World [tm].

However, he's got a point. In all the NSA/MI5/GHCQ snooping conversations a couple of months ago, most of us were looking for non-American products to escape Big Bro. Apple is one of America's success stories. Getting there will include some lobbying/endorsement from the government etc.

We don't know for sure, because iPhones/iPads are more or less black boxes. Sure, not everything Android is open source, either, but it's more "accessible" than IOS.

Given the political and diplomatical situation Putin has got himself into, he cannot possibly have Apple in the Kremlin. Moving to Samsung makes a lot of sense. And I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of VERY good developers in Russia who can improve things (Androidski, as someone called it) for Russia's purpose. (Not all Russian developers are naughty boys who move on the dark side of [western] law)

Again, I'm in no way pro Putin. But this decision is sensible from his point of view. And unlike most western politicians, he at least has got balls. (I'm sure most western governments still use American products after complaining about them, e.g. Germany's Mrs Merkel and others)